“John! It’s Laura. She’s pregnant!”
“She’s pregnant!” Bracken shouts, because everyone’s shouting the word pregnant and Bracken has absolutely no intention of being left out of the fun.
“She’s what?” John’s voice crackles, half-broken over a dodgy line.
“She’s pregnant!”
I turn around in the doorway, because I want to hear his response.
Everyone, right down to the little ones, is now looking at me like I’ve done something horrendous. The word pregnant is getting seared into the babies’ heads right now, and not in a good way.
“What?”
“Pregnant!” Mom enunciates clearly at the top of her lungs.
The line goes dead. Maybe he went through a tunnel.
Everyone is just staring at Mom and me now. Except for Eternity. She’s mashing spaghetti into Bracken’s hair.
There’s a heavy silence, and I can’t help but fill it. I’m not going to act like I did something wrong.
“Do you really want everyone thinking that being pregnant is such a bad thing?”
Mom opens her mouth and I know she’s going to argue by the way the lines between her brows deepen and her upper lip pulls back. But she stops herself.
“I was already scared,” I say. “But this made it so much worse. I don’t have to be here if you don’t want me to be. I can just go…”
She takes a breath. Her eyes fill with tears, and she approaches me, arms open as she realizes, no doubt, that she’s reacting the way her parents reacted when they found out she was going to have me. It was not a good time. I spent the first six months of my life in a leaky trailer, so I’m told.
“No,” she says. “No, baby, come here.”
She wraps me in a tight hug, and we both start crying. This isn’t what we planned, but life hasn’t been what it was planned to be for either of us.
“It’s going to be okay, baby,” she says. “You’re going to be a mom, and I’m going to be a grandma.”
“Yay! I’m going to have a baby too!” Eva chimes in.
“You are not!” Mom and I say at the same time.
“Okay,” she says, taking a deep breath. “Dinner. Let’s eat. The meatballs are going to be cold.”
CHAPTER 17
Sam
I’ve found Johnny Four Fingers’ hangout. It wasn’t hard. I just had to follow the overly jacked meatheads to a gym on the wrong side of town. I’m sitting in his office, enjoying the ambiance. There’s a steady sound of dull thudding outside where men are attacking punching bags.
His office has a bunch of faded photos on the wall. Sports teams. Boxing champions. A signed one of Muhammad Ali looks particularly interesting. This is a man who knows how to live a double life. I can respect that.
The door opens and John walks in. He’s wearing a suit tailored to his shoulders, his neck, and his barrel chest, which tells me it’s not off the rack. This man spends money sometimes. Interesting that his home and his place of business are equally run down, while he occasionally makes himself look good.
He stops dead and stares at me.
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
He’s looking at me like I’m a dead bit of dinner who just got up and started talking to him. I bet most people who have an encounter with Johnny don’t come back for a second one. I’m more persistent than most.
I’m more everything than most.
